Hangzhou, January 24 – Alibaba’s AI assistant Qwen has surpassed 10 million downloads in just one week since its public beta launch, making it the fastest-growing AI application in history, surpassing the initial growth rates of ChatGPT, Sora, and DeepSeek.
The explosive adoption is attributed to the strong technology foundation and open source influence of Alibaba’s Qwen model series. Since its full open source release in 2023, Qwen has surpassed competitors such as Llama and DeepSeek to become one of the most widely adopted open source large-scale language models in the world, with over 600 million cumulative downloads worldwide.
The recently released flagship model, Qwen3-Max, currently ranks among the top three in the world in performance indicators, outperforming major international models such as GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4. The model has also gained traction in Silicon Valley, with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky saying his company is “heavily reliant on Qwen” for speed and quality, while NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang pointed to Qwen’s growing dominance of the world’s open source models. market.
Building on this momentum in both the open source and enterprise sectors, Alibaba released the Qwen app on November 17th and rapidly captured the consumer market. Within three days, “Qwen Panic” reached the top three on Apple’s App Store free chart, and “Qwen Panic” began trending on social media overseas.
Alibaba positions Qwen as a “personal AI assistant that can chat and perform tasks,” and deeply integrates with e-commerce, maps, and local services to enhance agent AI capabilities, enabling cross-scenario task execution as well as content understanding and generation.
Industry observers see the success of the beta as just the beginning, predicting that Qwen could evolve into national-level applications that support China’s ambitions to lead the global AI race.
